Patches

I once owned an IBM Thinkpad R31, a fairly good computer with a quite buggy BIOS, especially when it comes to APM. In particular, when reading /proc/apm while moving the TrackPoint or using the keyboard one byte got lost from the TrackPoint or keyboard. Removing a byte from a multi-byte mouse protocol with bad redundance is not a pretty sight. Usually the mouse pointer will jump around the screen and press all the wrong buttons until finally the driver manages to get into sync again. With programs frequently polling /proc/apm to get battery status, this gets very annoying.

Making sure no program ever reads /proc/apm is a possible solution, but eventually something you hadn't anticipated will read it and mess up your mouse pointer. Moving from APM to ACPI is another solution, but that brings its own set of problems. Instead I wrote a very simple patch that makes reading /proc/apm harmless by avoiding the APM calls. The first time /proc/apm is read, and every time user 1005 (just change the number to whatever user you want) reads it, the real APM call is performed. The result is saved and returned for later readings. All battery monitor applets will still work, but they will only be updated if you read /proc/apm as user 1005 (or whatever you change it to).

Note that this is a problem occurring on IBM Thinkpad R31 only (as far as I know), so there is no need to use this patch on any other computer.

BitTornado is a nice BitTorrent client, but a couple of bugs are very annoying. The first problem is that if you temporarily postpone further downloading of a file, that file will be deleted when BitTornado exits. The first patch simply removes the code performing the deletion.

Another problem is that BitTornado backtraces if some files are missing when it is starting, so e.g. torrents partially downloaded with postponed file downloads without the first patch or with files missing for some other reason are impossible to resume. The second patch makes BitTornado simple create new files if they are missing.

In my search for a decent window manager I once tried Metacity which together with Brightside is almost usable. But just almost, windows are forbidden to be moved so that any point is above the top of the screen, which is very annoying. This small patch just removes that limitation.

MagicPoint is the program I use when holding presentations. Unfortunately, a bug in the font caching code creates a delay of around ten seconds each time you switch page, at least for some font configurations, which makes it unusable as a presentation tool. This small patch corrects the bug and makes page switching fast.